Chowhound Closes Immediately after 25 Years of Food Obsession, Wisdom and Discussion

Chowhound, the web page that began 25 many years ago as a digital gathering area for obsessive food items fans, will near down on March 21, the web site introduced on Monday.

“This incredibly hard decision is owing to limits in the capabilities and means necessary to preserve the internet site on an ongoing foundation,” its moderators explained. Purple Ventures, the media corporation that owns Chowhound, declined to comment further more.

Chowhound was started in 1997 by Jim Leff, a jazz trombonist and writer whose working day work opportunities financed his fervid quest for deliciousness, along with a fairly far more silent spouse, Bob Okumura.

In its heady early times it was a house to locate recommendations for the very best barbecue, arepas or Albanian bureks in New York, together with passionate rants and relentless arguments above kimchi, lengua tacos and lahmacun.

“Chowhound wasn’t just meals chat, it was by and for extremist people who’ve tried each individual quesadilla in Sunset Park,” Mr. Leff claimed Wednesday.

The ’90s were being thrilling for meals-loving New Yorkers. A modest pack of appetite-driven writers was prowling the back again alleys of all 5 boroughs, applying to dining places of every form the classes learned from countrywide writers like Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern, whose mouthwatering odes to burgoo, chess pie and brain sandwiches (a St. Louis specialty) revived curiosity in regional American cooking

Amid them were being Robert Sietsema, who wrote a e-newsletter, “Down the Hatch,” right before becoming a member of The Village Voice and at some point Eater New York and Sylvia Carter, who wrote an superb column for New York Newsday just before it shut down in 1995. I joined this group in early 1992, initiating the $25 and Beneath column for The New York Occasions.

Probably the most obsessive of all was Mr. Leff, who, when I 1st satisfied him in 1993, was writing a cafe column for New York Press, an option newspaper whole of exciting composing.

Mr. Leff, it appeared, was constantly getting the finest imaginable Fujianese noodle dish in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, cooked by a girl who appeared on a street corner, but only on Thursdays, unless it was raining, in which circumstance she’d arrive on Tuesdays concerning noon and 1 p.m.

These were being also the early times of the world wide web, when plodding telephone modems could small-circuit brains with their connecting screeches. Chowhound was the merger of these two worlds, a neighborhood hangout for food adventurers — chowhounds, Mr. Leff known as them, distinguishing them from dilettantish foodies — to indulge their opinionated obsessions among a like-minded community.

The web-site, when providing Mr. Leff a large, fast forum, was simple and unadorned, carried out on the low-priced, like the duct-taped Naugahyde seats in Mr. Leff’s favorite sort of eating places. But for individuals of us who cared, it was an oasis in which the city’s multitude of cultures — the Gorgeous Mosaic, in the previous Mayor David N. Dinkins’s unforgettable phrase — appeared in delectable depth.

The discussions motivated the imagination and an insatiable hunger. I was not an avid participant. I certified extra as a lurker. For all those of us on the cafe prowl, Chowhound was like a day-to-day tip provider. A barbecue joint with no a cell phone close to Kennedy Global Airport? A jerk store on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx? Noodles in Flushing? I’m on my way.

Chowhound before long expanded outside of New York to other metropolitan areas. Combative people being what they are, animosities and rivalries blossomed and splinter websites formed, like egullet.com (also now closed) and mouthfulsfood.com. None rather captured the ornery compulsion that animated Chowhound in its prime a long time.

Weary of running the web-site on a shoestring, in 2006 Mr. Leff and Mr. Okumura bought Chowhound to CNET, which was obtained by Red Ventures in 2020. By then, the world wide web and the foods planet had altered. To start with weblogs and then social media had given any one the means to bypass village accumulating places like Chowhound.

I started creating whole-time about wine in 2004 and missing the thread of Chowhound. But other people did not. In the previous few of days, Twitter was entire of reminiscences about inspirations, arguments and friendships birthed on that amazing web page.

I asked Mr. Leff no matter whether a internet site like Chowhound was wanted any extended.

“These times there are myriad areas to chat about food, and everyone’s obtained an viewpoint, but it will never be economically feasible to constrain ambition and goal for a constrained, qualified group,” he explained. “But 1 working day some other true believer may well give it a shot, not for glory or revenue, but just the sheer usefulness of it.”

Web site or not, Mr. Leff is nonetheless accomplishing what he’s constantly accomplished.

“Before I wrote about meals, I was producing finds and no one cared,” he mentioned. “Then I grew to become a writer, and individuals cared. Then Chowhound, and they cared a ton. Now I proceed to make excellent finds and no one cares. From my point of view, it is all been a comfy straight line. I’m a chowhound to my main.”